Danny Kelly: Classic or Dud?

reminds me of the remark, from 6-7 years ago, a friend of mine made while seeing a fresh copy of Q -
"another glaring example of the obscenely successful rock press"

...but i'm not sure whether DanK was then the editor any more - then again, would/did that ever make any great difference, Q-wise, who edited it

in an NME context: ultra-dud, I think (but Mark S to thread, surely!)

Kelly's finest NME journalistic moment of course was in his article on the NME's Top 100 Albums list printed in the 30 Nov '85 issue, in which he stated that Psychocandy would have been one of the greatest albums ever made, had it only been released two weeks earlier.

I actually really liked working for him because he was all uncley about explaining British things to me (and if I felt patronised I'd just widen my eyes and go 'wow, really?' and he'd cut it out). He took me to IPC canteen for lunch on the first day I came in to the office and didn't mind having piss taken out of him by me for eating peas like that, ie. with a knife. And the day Thatcher cried was the best/most fun day I have ever spent working in an office. Danny: (to me) this is a very important day in HISTORY! Try to remember all of it!

his remarks on that book abt creation recs were good.

Momus once pretended that Danny Kelly had said of him "why can't he just write about football like the rest of us"? For many years I genuinely believed this.

DK is a funny smart man: but also — typical clashfan hah! — has his ethics both ways a lot too often (i can think of tabloidy stunts the nme pulled which he just chuckled at; and — in the end — he would always end up defending conformism over non-conformism, esp.in regard to writer-style) (to be fair i think he always underestimated his clout as dep.ed at nme, and pulled away from battles he could/would have won: deep down i suspect he couldn't believe his luck landing the career he'd landed, and felt that rocking the boat might strip it all from him — this was nonsense, he had the job bcz he wz good at it, and others were a lot more shakily installed...) < / cryptic >

(the ethics conflict is less apparent i think in his sports journalism, but then i know a lot less and care a lot less about that)

Momus tried to bribe Danny Kelly for a good live review (£5).

It's weird how my name is now forever intertwined with Danny Kelly's. Even the NME made the connection, printing when Danny Kelly left 'Momus is probably throwing his hat in the air'. In fact I had mainly good experiences with the fellow. When I signed to Creation he told me 'That's a very good label you've just signed to' -- which sort of meant 'Don't ruin everything, you twunt'. He actually let me write some stuff for the NME -- articles about Brel, Gainsbourg, and a Jake Thackray interview which never happened.

My real arch-enemies of the time were people like Dave Gedge and Billy Bragg. In fact, I think I just hated anybody English in the English music industry. The solution was leaving. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to you all (and John Peel too); I now realise I didn't hate you, just your Englishness. Your obsession with class, with football (as class), your never getting over punk, your stolid allegiance to guitar rock, your closure to anything French, Japanese, German (Kelly apparently has a house full of books about the second world war, which says a lot, really.)

Oh, and mainly your essential conservatism and anti-aestheticism. And what Mark says about conformism.